The Danger of Using The Link A Dink Plugin To Form Unnatural Links

Recently this plugin was written about on CashQuests and Blogging Tips. I am going to explain why you should not use it.

In case you haven’t heard about the Link A Dink Plugin it allows you to set keywords/keyword phrases to be automatically linked to a page of your choice. This can be internal pages of your blog, or as suggested on CashQuests they could be sold to an advertiser looking for some link juice. Whenever you use that word/phrase it links too the page you have set it to link too.

Superficial Benefits

1. Your readers are shown relevant information without you having to remember what the best post would be to link to.
2. You can direct traffic to a page directly through the links.
3. A major search engine ranking factor is the anchor text of inbound links, therefore these links will shoot the desired page to the top of the search results.
4. If sold to advertisers you could make a whole wad of cash.

Why Each Of Those Benefits Are BS

1. Hopefully when writing a post there is a focus to it and you are trying to get a point across. You don’t see me linking the word ‘blogging’ to the Blogging Fingers Homepage each time I use it. Even with a more specific phrase, like “niche blogging”. Sometimes it may be appropriate to link to my niche blogigng post, but if I did it on every occasion often it wouldn’t fit in with what I am saying. It would mean in this paragraph I would have linked to it twice already instead of once! Links should be chosen carefully to strengthen an argument.

2. Having 100s of links appear in your archives isn’t going to sent floods of traffic. If your traffic stats are anything like mine, it’s the recent posts that get most of the social media traffic, and a few other pages get steady organic Google traffic. It’s a fact that almost all posts on the archive of a blog don’t get much traffic.

3. The supposed SEO benefits are non-existent. I had used the word “blogging” 10 times in the posts on the Blogging Fingers Homepage before this article was published. That means overall there are 100s of uses of the word “blogging”. Do you really think Google looks kindly on 100s of links, all with the exact same anchor text appearing over night? I think not. You’re probably much more likely to be penalised than rewarded by Google for using the Link A Dink Plugin.

4. The advertisers will realise this and not stick around paying you for long. Not to mention that even linking out like this may also result in penalisation just like linking in. I’m deliberately avoiding the elephant in the room of the issue of paid links, which is not the issue in hand.

I would say the plugin has potential, but this sort of unnatural linking is just the sort of thing to avoid. I use internal linking to link to my web hosting packages page when ever a suitable occasion arises, but that is a rare event.

The Solution

If you really want to get into this sort of unnatural linking, there is a more flexible plugin called aLinks. This lets you chose how often you want that word to become a link and it can make the links look much more natural to your readers and the Googlebot. Use it with caution.

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